E-cigarette 'safety' is just vapor and mirrors

OUR VIEW

The assault on reality is back, courtesy of the tobacco industry.

The weapon of choice this time is the electronic cigarette. Sure, we may have thought that smoking was in full retreat. But the industry was just regrouping behind a gimmick that seems to solve many of the tobacco industry's problems.

"E-cigarettes" emit vapor, not smoke, which contains nicotine, but may be present in lower concentrations than conventional cigarettes.

The industry would have you believe e-cigarettes help smokers kick their habit; that people around the e-cigarette user are safe because there is no secondhand smoke; oh, and they would very much like for you to believe that e-cigarettes are just for adults.

That includes the cherry, strawberry, vanilla and cookies-and-cream flavored e-cigarettes that can be found in convenience stores all over.

If only cigarette companies were as good at science as they are at subterfuge.

Electronic cigarettes may be the first gateway drug that was actually designed for that purpose. The number of high school students who say they tried e-cigarettes more than doubled - from 4.7 percent to 10 percent - between 2011 and 2012, according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. The percentage of middle-schoolers trying e-cigarettes also doubled, from 1.4 percent to 2.7 percent.

Ads for the battery-powered cigarettes appear to lure adults only, using celebrities that few teens would recognize, but after all, the cigarette companies know what would happen to them if they tried to bring back Joe Camel.

This time, the laws haven't caught up with the technology - or least, the novelty. For example, e-cigarettes can be bought online. And while retail stores in some states are not supposed to sell them to minors, many merchants appear not to know that.

And the high taxes that have been imposed on conventional cigarettes with effective results in discouraging heavy smoking, are not imposed on e-cigarettes.

Cheap, easy to get, and in kid-enticing flavors. Isn't it clear that the cigarette industry is greedily grooming its next generation of addicts? Even if e-cigarettes contain less nicotine, users will gravitate to conventional cigarettes, because their bodies will want more of the drug. That's what addiction is. And we know what comes next: heart disease, cancer and emphysema.

The federal government is expected to announce next month whether it will begin to regulate e-cigarettes as tobacco products. With the studies coming in pretty quickly now showing that even the vapor contains toxic substances, the FDA should not hesitate to crack down.